A look at the Kobo Reader

On one of our regular trips to Chapter's, I could not help but notice the rather large Kobo display that had been set up near the middle of the store. For your information, the Kobo is Chapter's/Indigo's attempt to rival the pretty established Amazon Kindle e-Reader. And a lot of people feel that they may have a winner on their hands. The Kobo is a pretty standard looking, e-ink based display device to read e-books. Like the Kindle, it links to an online bookstore for purchases, this time making use of the large, 2 million title library offered by Kobobooks. The average price is around $9 a book, but many free downloads are available.

With the device's internal 1GB memory and an SD slot that can accept cards up to 4GB, this gives the Kobo an average maximum capacity of 1000 books, which is a small library on its own. The device itself is quite plain, but up to the task it has been given:

I feel that the design is probably the least technologically intrusive of the current batch of e-book readers, but that may of course change with the introduction of the iPad.

The Kobo gets you started with a list of 100 classic books, free with purchase of the device, which at $149 CAN, could almost be considered a bargain. Another way to look at it is $1.00 a book and $49 for a reader, which seems practically fair! This is a better offer than any of the competing manufacturers and I hope it becomes a business practice for the others.

Head over to the site, or even better, head to Chapter's and have a look for yourself; it might be time to add this tool to your reading arsenal!